On the whole, then, it was more comfortable to indulge in such reflections as we shot through the mighty oak-forest in a railway-carriage bound for Siszek, than to sneak through these mysterious shadows on foot with the feelings of one of our great-grandfathers, when doomed to traverse Hampstead Heath on a dark night. These Croatian highwaymen, however, immediately under notice, had hitherto conducted the business of the road on the most gentlemanly principles; and though a kind of ‘commercial’ with whom we travelled seemed a bit scared, even he could report no thrilling tales of bloodshed. There were sixteen of these Hajduks,[162] as the Croats called them, who had taken to outlawry to avoid the military conscription, which has just superseded the older organisation of the Granitza. Soldiers have been in pursuit, but fruitlessly, since not only are the hills about covered with unfathomable forest and hollowed—so we were told—with caverns, but the peasants, like those of Greece and Southern Italy, are in league with the brigands, supplying them with food, and refusing to reveal their hiding-places. The gendarmes, indeed, express hopes of seizing their quarry when the leaves have fallen and the snow is on the ground. Meantime they are at large. Nor let us judge too harshly of their profession, for in this old world East of Europe the Hajduk is often a gentleman in his way. ’Tis Robin Hood and his merry men who still live on, roughly redressing their wrongs in a vicarious fashion against that society which refuses them legal requital, but capable none the less of much tenderness to women and children, and discriminating their friends from the class that oppresses them. Across the Turkish frontier the cause of national freedom, hopelessly lost centuries ago on the battlefield, has been championed from generation to generation by the Hajduks of the forest mountain, in achievements not unsung by Sclavonic bards; and, likely enough, these Croatian brothers are striving too for ancient liberties, as they understand them. It was late at night by the time we arrived at Siszek, so we were glad enough to avail ourselves of a car bound for the ‘White Ship’ inn on the Kulpa Quay, in company with a Serbian lady and her child—she disdaining not either for herself or boy the national costume of Free Serbia. And verily she had her reward. For what could be more appropriate than the rich silver embroidery flowered on the purple-velvet field of her mantle—efflorescent with the poetic yearning of the race for that gorgeous Orient, a yearning as lively as the abhorrence from its yoke—an echo from the Serbian lyre—a protest against your cold foggy West—but subdued withal by a Roman-matronly coiffure wondrously becoming to the tranquil grace of Serbian motherhood?